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Creationism and the Universe
Creationists don’t have very good ideas about how the Universe works. History of our understanding of the universe It was thought in ancient Greece that anything that wasn't a planet (wanderer, including the sun and moon) in the sky was fixed on a giant, hollow, rotating sphere. Conservatives persecuted anyone who disagreed. The three-dimensional nature of the universe later gained acceptance, but everyone assumed that it was all part of the same compact system with the sun at about the center of it all, even after Telescopes could spot galaxies outside our own. Conservatives persecuted anyone who disagreed. In the 20th Century, things started making more sense as individual stars in external galaxies were resolved and redshifts were measured to find recessional velocities of distant objects. After one final mumble in the scientific community that we may actually be at the rough center of the universe (since everything is moving away from us), the inflation models of the Big Bang theory finally settled the fact that the universe has no center. Galaxies are therefore scattered in the universe in a rather homogeneous and isotropic sense. ydMore sensible Conservsatives accept all that but Christian fundamentalism find this hard to grasp because apparently the Bible explicitly says otherwise: And on the second day the Lord sayeth, "Let there be the heavens and the stars within shall NOT be clustered with large-scale homogeneity and isotropy on a geometry conforming to global translational and rotational invariance," and so the heavens and the stars formed and arranged themselves in such a way that doth not make sense and leadeth many wise men astray by putting the observations made with their own eyes in conflict with what hath been written in this Thy book. Have I mentioned that this book is the literal word of God in this chapter? Nay? Such negligence shalt not go unpunished in the afterlife. —Genesis 15:7 And therefore they haven't really persecuted anyone who disagrees yet. Furious debate within the scientific community (as always) According to liberal scientists (and in sharp contradiction to the theories of Dr. Andy who lives in a cave in Idaho, carving his formulas on the walls with nothing more than a shotgun and a lot of ammo), galaxies are gravitationally constrained in such a way that is inconsistent with established understanding of observed mass and Newtonian gravity with General Relativity, and new evidence shows that dark matter, some as-yet-unobserved form of matter than is vastly more abundant than ordinary, visible matter, is likely the cause of this discrepancy. Even conservatives seem to accept such findings as consistent with the Bible, since it was dark before it was light, and therefore dark matter. One can also deduce the relative distance and age of galaxies based on observations of standard candles like stellar clusters. All stars in these clusters form at about the same time with similar element distributions, but with different masses. Observation of the color and relative luminosity of the stars can be matched with previous observations of local clusters, giving very accurate results of age and distance that can be used in understanding the origins of the universe. Creationists accept such findings in full, with appropriate scaling constants. For example, mainstream science indicates that a cluster of bright blue-white stars is probably very young, on the order of tens to hundreds of millions of years old, while a cluster of many large and small red stars will be many billions of years old. Creation science, however, comes to the obvious realization that even a million years is an awful long time, and that there is no way a person could live that long. Therefore, mainstream scientists are just confused about their words and scales, and most of these stars are probably about 4000 or 5000 years old at most, with a few going back all the way to 6000 years (which is so long ago that people hunted dinosaurs!). Creation scientists don't dispute that stars and galaxies are old - they just are a bit more careful of throwing around silly words like "a gazillion" or "terahertz" or "empirical deduction". Category:Astronomy Category:Religion